Educators prep for new Common Core standards

Temecula Valley Union School District administrator Andree Grey, center, lead the early discussions with district teachers and principals on Thursday as they engaged during a workshop to prepare for implementing Common Core standards next year.
— Don Boomer

Temecula Valley Union School District administrator Andree Grey, center, lead the early discussions with district teachers and principals on Thursday as they engaged during a workshop to prepare for implementing Common Core standards next year.
— Don Boomer

In other words, the new standards will assess how students use the tools they’re given in the classroom.

“Kids today are moving into a world that’s very different than it was when the current standards were created in 1997,” said Joe Balleweg, a principal on special assignment with the Temecula Valley Unified School District. “They already have all kinds of information at their fingertips. It’s now about how they can use that content, and our charge is to help these students embody the skills they’ll need.”

To that end, teachers across Southwest County -- from Temecula to Murrieta to Lake Elsinore to Perris -- are attending workshops and training sessions to rethink the way they relay information to students.

They’re writing new pacing guides, developing best practices and collaborating at staff development sessions aimed at digging deeper than what’s required by current standard assessment tests, which will be replaced by Common Core tests after the 2013-14 school year.

“It’s an exciting time I think for a lot of teachers,” said Alain Guevara, Lake Elsinore Unified’s superintendent of instructional support services. “Teachers by nature always want to have their students understand and apply what they have been taught and the idea that performance tasks (are) a big part of these standards is exciting.”

It’s also daunting in the wake of an economic crisis that has left school districts working with significantly less money.

The question that many district officials are asking is how they are expected to implement national teaching standards if California’s spending on public education already falls several thousand dollars short of a national average that sits at about $12,000 per student.

Temecula Valley Unified, for instance, was funded at about $5,300 per student this year.

“We are very concerned with how we’re going to get these resources in the hands of our principals and teachers who have to learn a very different way of teaching,” said Lori Ordway-Peck, Temecula Valley Unified’s assistant superintendent of business services. “It’s a pretty impressive hill that we have to climb given our no-resources environment. We were hopeful that when the state decided to go down this path, someone would recognize we were going to need some assistance, at least in terms of computers.

“But so far, we’re not seeing anyone recognize that.”

Locally, administrators in the Temecula Valley Unified and Perris Union High school districts did just that when they passed two bond measures to pay for various construction, renovation and repair projects, which will include updating those districts’ campuses to prepare for the technology needed for the new computerized assessments.

The need for tablets, electronic textbooks -- not to mention man hours needed to learn how to teach Common Core standards -- only adds to the districts’ challenges to meet by the start of the 2014-15 school year. To get a head start, some districts, like Temecula Valley Unified, will begin rolling out the standards in the classroom next fall.

“The state expects us to be there in a year and a half and it’s good to point the arrow high,” said Greenberg with Perris Union. “But again, I hope the state understands the resources needed to do this. You can’t go Common Core without providing training and infrastructure.”